May is Global Employee Health and Fitness Month (GEHFM), so it’s a great opportunity for you to inject some new energy into your employee wellness programs and introduce new measures for improving employee wellbeing. Healthy, well employees are more likely to be productive, happy, and engaged. Here are some ways you can help your employees achieve higher levels of health and physical fitness, based on suggestions made by the nonprofit sponsors of this special awareness month.
Kick off Global Employee Health and Fitness Month with healthier moments
Improving employee health doesn’t need to be limited to just Global Employee Health and Fitness Month, nor does it need to require substantial investments of time, energy, and resources. Global Employee Health and Fitness Month reminds everyone that modest one-at-a-time measures can add up to big improvements over time. You can facilitate healthy moments at your workplace by providing nutritious snacks such as fresh fruits and vegetables as an alternative to sweet, starchy office treats. Encourage your employees to get more exercise by subsidizing gym memberships or providing incentives for walking or biking to work. Bringing in a massage therapist to offer shoulder rubs during high-pressure projects is another fun and cost-effective idea.
Form healthy groups
Peer companionship can make the difference between success and failure in sticking to healthy new habits. For that reason, Global Employee Health and Fitness Month’s second set of recommendations revolve around forming groups for sharing sustainable healthy activities that will continue on past this one month. You can facilitate such groups by hiring trainers to offer free on-site fitness classes in yoga or other forms of exercise. You can also help employees organize cycling groups, lunchtime walking groups, or after-work activity clubs.
Create company-wide projects
To achieve a sense of alignment in the concept of wellness throughout your entire organization, Global Employee Health and Fitness Month encourages you to initiate a company-wide health-related project this month. Here are a few options for creating “culminating projects” that every employee can be invited to join:
- Hold a step competition using digital apps to track steps and see who took the most steps during a given period.
- Sponsor a company 5K race to raise funds for a cause selected by the workers.
- Plan a fun fitness event for workers and their families.
- Transform a piece of company property into a volunteer-tended vegetable garden.
Global Employee Health and Fitness Month is a good opportunity to get creative and seek input from all your workers. Almost everyone spends time thinking about how they can improve their fitness, and your organization will benefit from the synergy of everyone joining together to lead healthier lives.
To learn more about how to enhance your organization’s culture, download our white paper, “Personalization: The Missing Link in Employee Experience.”
